Monday, September 22, 2008

"Everyone else is doing it, so I mise well..."

David Foster Wallace: An Apparently Epic (and Unknown) Figure in Literature





I’m a well-read, intelligent 20-something who is preparing for a career in academia (through humanities, of course), and I had never heard of David Foster Wallace until he killed himself about a week ago. When he showed up on the bottom of front pages across the nation, I had no idea who the hell he was. Because of that, I didn’t bother to read any articles about him. But then there came the Great Barrage: every Op-Ed page in every newspaper, whether it was The New York Times or the college press, began receiving and publishing moving, vibrant, incredibly fascinating eulogies of the man. At this point, I had to figure just who the hell this guy was and why he took up so much space everywhere.


Well, turns out he’s considered the “most brilliant mind of his generation” and is widely considered a top 5 writer of his era, and he’s near the top of that 5. So just who is this guy, and why have I never heard of him?



It got me thinking about writers and how we come to know them. If it’s not through some novel that really tears it up on The Times bestseller list (say, Dan Brown, The DaVinci Code), then it’s because his writing has gone through the “system,” whereby it takes years, even decades, for the books to matriculate down into the realm of high school and college reading lists and curriculum. This process, though, seems to take forever. What the fuck? If this guy is really so brilliant, then why have all these intelligent college students never heard of him? It makes sense to say that it’s because he was only 46, he was a postmodern postmodernist (don't question; it makes sense), and his stuff has yet to earn the right to sit next to Jane Austen and Ernest Hemingway. It could take decades before a writer’s work secures that apparent “privilege.” So in that sense, it seems plausible that someone so brilliant has gone unnoticed by the multiple generations that came after him.



But then I wondered: by hanging himself, Wallace sprayed every newspaper, blog, and information-giving medium with eulogies on his behalf, articles detailing his life and times, and now thousands of 20-somethings all over the nation are putting his epic and monumental masterpiece (so I've been told) Infinite Jest on their reading lists. I know I did, and so did some of my friends. So, by ending his own life, in perfect concert with the themes that haunt his work, he has, possibly, skipped the normal waiting period for a writer of his caliber to merit that place next to Hemingway et al.

What if he planned this?

Yeah, I doubt it, though it would make for a good modern (postmodern?) update of The Death of a Salesman. Wallace, in his finest hour, achieved that part of the American Dream concerned with immortality by killing himself. How ironic. He achieved immortality by taking advantage of his own mortality. Genius.

Wallace committing suicide and therefore becoming immortal (logic!), along with possible premeditation, fits perfectly into the drama of literary rEVOLUTION. You had the moderns in the early 20th century doing all kinds of wacky things that defied convention (Ezra Pound! e.e. cummings!). And it only made sense that they should call themselves “modern” so as to make it even more clear that all that 19th century shit was obsolete and outdated.

Then, you had a rolling broil of movements, prominent especially in the 60’s; eventually they all got together and called themselves postmodern. They were a reaction against the reaction. The moderns reacted against the predominating view of things (19th century shit), and now the postmoderns were reacting against the predominating view of things (modernism; getting all this?).

Then came the 80’s and 90’s where people like David Foster Wallace and the other children of postmodernism needed something to react against. Initially, they couldn’t find anything, because it’s hard to react against the guys reacting against the guys making the original reaction. There’s so much reacting going on that it’s kind of hard to find your niche, your place in all that mess. But, being human, they found a way. They reacted against whatever was there, which happened to be the postmoderns. But they needed a name! Unfortunately, it seems they were too busy reacting against stuff to think of something good. Besides, you already had moderns and postmoderns, so what else is left? Thus was born what can only be described as postmodern postmodernism. Yes, that’s correct. A group of younger, cooler, postmoderns reacting against the older, more dead postmoderns.



When the triviality and nonsensical nature of all this becomes clear, it is easy to see that Wallace’s suicide fits right in. Nothing makes sense, life is bullshit; fuck it, I’m out of here.

So the question arises: was David Foster Wallace merely fulfilling his post-postmodern destiny of saying, definitively, that life is absolute trash? Possibly, for when he killed himself, he made his point a little better than all the other guys who just wrote about it. It’s like the difference between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau: Emerson talked a lot of crap about living in nature and being one with the transcendental oversoul, but Thoreau went out in the woods and fucking did that shit. He lived in nature and attempted to communicate with the oversoul. He had no idea how to do that, but he fucking tried, alright? Obviously, he failed, and more often than not he came into town to steal food from people, but at least he gave it a go. And so, while all the other post-postmoderns were relaxing in their tenured professorships, David Foster Wallace was out there, on the front lines, committing suicide. That’s real, man.

In any case, Wallace was a nobody to me nine days ago and now he’s famous. I imagine this event doesn't help the cause of those trying to persuade others that suicide is not the path to immortality. "Fuck that," Wallace says, "I’m dead and famous. Immortality, bitches."

And that right there is logic, folks. I would say Rest in Peace, Dave, but I'm sure if he could, he'd punch me right in the mouth.




0 erotic poetry prompts: